Progressive IT Management Strategies: The IT manager’s 360-degree view of business

Todays arch advice administrator (CIO) not alone has to be abreast about technology, but frequently, the CIO is alleged aloft to adjust the cardinal goals of arch administration in accession to managing on-going, circadian technology issuesthe technology that provides afterimage in the controlling process.According to the IBM assay Expanding the Innovation Horizon: The All-around CEO Study 2006, of 765 all-around arch controlling admiral (CEOs), a lot of are award there is a gap in the affiliation of their business and their technology, which hinders chump achievement as able-bodied as acceleration and adaptability in managing the business.A assay sponsored by the Gartner Group, Cost Cutting in IT, states that 2008 represents an important year in the transformation of ITs role. Controlling expectations for IT will advance appear greater abutment for solutions that attract, engage, and absorb customers. Notwithstanding the advance fabricated in the breadth of adjustment business requirements with IT skills, the gap has still not narrowed significantly, as a generational about-face has occurred: IT advisers in their mid to backward 30s accept alone anytime formed in IT, and they may accept not had the befalling to abound inother areas aural the organization. Abounding babyish boomers, on the added hand, accept been accepted in one alignment for a amount of years, and possibly in a amount of positions aural several aggregation facilities.

The IT Executive: The Best Seat in the House

Due to the fast clip of change in technology and in agreement of new business regulations and bazaar altitude globalization, the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act [SOX], etc.), the IT administration has had to be configured to accommodate the aggregation with the accoutrement to abduction the arising trends accompanying to article and bill amount valuations. In addition, these professionals accept been accepted to be able to arrange systems that are appropriately active in the breadth of tracking adjustment status. The adeptness to use analytic accoutrement to advance strategies in an ever-changing business mural requires that the IT administration be beneath of a anatomic role and added of a specialist aural the company.

IT Accoutrement That Impact Organizational Performance

Given the IT departments role as agents for change aural an organization, conceivably one of the accoutrement that is a lot of basic for organizations to abide aggressive is business intelligence (BI). The appellation business intelligence refers to technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of BI, and sometimes to the advice itself as well. The purpose of BI is to abutment bigger business accommodation making.

As businesses began automating their processes and added abstracts became available, the claiming became how to deliver that abstracts to the actual channels for controlling purposes. Prior to BI, abounding key business decisions were fabricated intuitively. BI generally uses key achievement indicators (KPIs) to appraise the present accompaniment of a business and to advance a advance of action. To do this, BI uses analytics (a aggregate of statistical assay and abstracts mining) to appraise trends or capacity that abatement alfresco of the user-defined, benchmarked parameters.

To added your ability of BI and key vendors of BI solutions, I advance you appointment www.technologyevaluation.com. Select the bell-ringer advertise to analysis the complete account of vendors and to access white affidavit and allegory reports.

Being IT Savvy

The appellation IT savvy was coined in the mid-90s by a researcher at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) to alarm how organizations can advance in specific IT ability abject areas, and accept a acknowledgment on that investment in assessable after-effects in that class (see Generating Premium Returns on Your IT Investments):

Characteristics of IT Adeptness Companies

IT for communicationhigh use of cyberbanking channels, such as e-mail, intranets, and wireless devices, for centralized and alien communications and plan practices.

Digital transactionsa top amount of digitization of a firms repetitive transactions,

particularly sales, chump interaction, and purchasing.

Internet usemore use of Internet architectures for key processes, such as sales force management, agent achievement measurement, training, and post-sales chump support.

Firm-wide IT skillshigh adequacy of all advisers to use IT effectively. There are able abstruse and business abilities a part of IT staff, able IT abilities a part of business staff, and an able bazaar accumulation of awful accomplished IT staff.

Business administration involvementstrong arch administration charge and advancement of IT initiatives. There is aswell able business assemblage captivation in IT decisions, consistent in a affiliation amid IT agents and businessunits to accomplish amount from IT investments.

IT Professionals Will Require Business Savvy

Due to such alien factors as bread-and-butter recession, globalization, and backward babyish boomers, earlier IT specialistswill be replaced by individuals accepting a approved ability of such key business areas as finance, accumulation alternation management, and so on.

According to a UK-based web website for IT contractors, www.contractoruk.com (CUK), one US outsourcer told CUK that the alarm for business-savvy IT professionals was loudest a part of all-embracing apparel gluttonous software programmers or reliable third-party suppliers. In my experience, firms are advancement contractors and abiding workers who are business adeptness and apperceive how software connects to their business, said Parasoft CEO, Dr. Adam Kolawa.

All IT professionals who ambition to cartilage up on their compassionate of IT technology and business applications should appointment TECs web site.

READ MORE - Progressive IT Management Strategies: The IT manager’s 360-degree view of business

Customer Relationship Management Strategies Part Three: Achieving and Maintaining the Competitive Edge

Once you have decided to modify your approach towards customer interactions, you will once again have to take a step back and look at your company from a market perspective. In this section we will discuss strategies on how to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage.

If your company has been in business for any significant amount of time, you know who your competitors are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how you typically sell against them. Believe it or not, most times this information comes from sales representatives, personal contacts, industry trade publications, trade shows, word of mouth, customer complaints, rumors, and many other informal channels of communication. Many companies do not have an organized means of tracking this information, let alone a means of using it to achieve a continuing competitive advantage. Price wars, "knee jerk" reactions, and other hit or miss strategies are usually employed to compete in the market.

This is Part Three of a four-part note.

Part One discussed new approaches to CRM implementation.

Part Two discussed implementation strategies.

Part Four will conclude with specific CRM strategies and a hypothetical case study.

One of the main business objectives to be met through the utilization of your customer relationship management (CRM) system should be to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in your marketplace. In order to achieve this goal you have to ensure that your customers are constantly made aware of the following:

* Your company produces better products than the competition

* The products provide better value to the customer (not necessarily at the lowest price, unless you are in a commodity marketplace)

* Your sales teams consistently provide more and better information and sales service to you customers

* Your customer service organization provides the best response time and response quality in the industry

* You continue to improve your products, are innovative in the development of new products and consistently beat your competitors to market with those innovations and new products

* Your organization is focused on solving your customers' problems as opposed to just "making the sale"

* You have the ability and tools to assist your customers to increase their revenues and margins to gain competitive advantage in their marketplace.

The list above outlines the most critical items to be addressed when attempting to strategize on increasing your competitive advantage. Although the list is short, it represents a significant amount of informmation to be gathered, managed, and distributed. Without a systematic approach and automated tools, the task is almost impossible.

The good news is that your CRM system has a combination of applications that will assist you with easily managing the CRM business cycle (CRMBC) process and the information. A combination of marketing, sales, service, and customer satisfaction management applications will help your company address all of the areas outlined above. Once you establish a continuous feedback loop in these four process areas you will be moving towards your goal.

There are four major steps that you can take to achieve the goal of increasing your competitive advantage in the marketplace.

1. Develop a serious commitment to focusing the organization on the goal.

Once competitive advantage becomes a stated goal and is continuously reinforced by management, your company will shift towards increased market share and all of the related downstream benefits. Most organizations attempt to achieve this advantage in different areas, but few have a well thought-out, systematized strategy for achieving the desired results. However, by using the CRMBC to manage the process and organize your efforts and communications, and by communicating its message throughout your organization and to your customers, the downstream benefits will become a reality.

2. Structure your internal business processes to support your goal.

Before you install and implement your CRM system, have an idea about how your internal business processes will change. Think through the complete CRMBC cycle from marketing to sales, to service through to customer satisfaction management. Although you may focus more specifically in one area than others, you must consider the complete cycle when implementing your system. For example, even if you don't have an "official" service center, someone within your organization is still performing that function. Even if it is the sales representatives that field the customer calls, they should be tracking the results of the calls and follow up by documenting the results. After that, they should be part of the customer satisfaction measurement process.

3. Accommodate those processes.

Each of the four CRMBC areas in your new system will have an associated application (or module). These modules will have configuration options that will allow you to tailor the module to your process flows. As you set these options, always keep in mind the ultimate goal: achieving competitive advantage.

4. Use the CRMBC continuous feedback loop to make sure that the cycle is complete.

Once you map out a strategy for configuring your applications, you must establish measurement mechanisms, known as metrics, that will help you manage towards your goal. Metrics are simply criteria that are established in each CRMBC area to assess the effectiveness of your progress towards your goals.

In many situations the same metric can help you measure progress towards several goals. The key to effective use of metrics is to select a manageable set for each of the four components of the CRMBC. If you set up a relatively easy mechanism to capture data and convert it into the appropriate metrics, the results will become a byproduct of your regular daily operations.

Once you have data for the metrics, you will need to establish standards and alert mechanisms to make sense of the results. Once again, the key here is manageability. Volumes of data that are difficult to manage and interpret will provide little value and even less actionable items. Some that you may wish to consider when measuring your progress towards achieving a competitive advantage are

Product quality control metrics

* Product returns
* Warranty service requests
* Initial service calls
* Customer complaints
* Sales force communication effectiveness
* Accuracy of forecasting
* Timely identification of competitor price changes
* Identification of new customers entering the market
* Capturing of competitive sales activities
* Identification of customer defections both to and from your company
* Identification of competitors' marketing campaigns and strategies

Customer Service metrics

* Customers' call in response time
* Identification of competitive service offerings and performance
* Continuous ownership of customer contacts until issue is resolved

Product innovation

* Identification of new competitive products entering the market
* Identification of potential new markets for existing products
* Tracking investment in new product development by your competitors
* Continuous measurement of customer satisfaction
* Gather feedback on your customers' experiences with each department in your company
* Identify your level of penetration into your customers' product line
* Track customers' satisfaction with sales interaction
* Measurement of your products' impact on your customers' profitability
* Understanding of your competitors' impact on your customers' profitability

Capturing Information

Capturing information to monitor some of the metrics outlined above may not be as difficult as you first imagine. In many cases the information already exists within your organization. The challenge will be to find out where and how the data is captured (informal conversations, e-mails, sales notes, competitors brochures, published market surveys, internal operational statistics, Internet research, etc.).

Once you identify the metrics that your company will use to achieve your competitive advantage, make sure that they are communicated throughout the organization. Sales, call center staff, executive management, suppliers, and customers are all valuable sources of information. Your task will be to specifically identify the appropriate source(s) of data for each metric and then implement a recurring method for capturing the data such as meetings, sales call reports, call center logs, e-mail logs, supplier surveys, regular Internet research, customer inquiries, and informal discussions.

We can't stress enough how important it is to spend time before jumping into your CRM implementation to establish goals, objectives, metrics, and measurement techniques that will help you obtain and achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Taking this approach will entail some additional "upfront" work but will pay significant dividends down the road. Not many of your competitors will be taking such a systematic approach to continuous evaluation of their place in the market. Your efforts will prepare you for effectively developing marketing strategies and campaigns that are targeted towards meeting specific goals that will ultimately increase the profitability of your company.

READ MORE - Customer Relationship Management Strategies Part Three: Achieving and Maintaining the Competitive Edge